Founded in Oxford, England in 1984, Verse is an international journal that publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. The print edition publishes portfolios of 20-40 pages, while the Verse site publishes book reviews and individual poems. Verse is edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki.

Monday, March 14, 2016

I know that I
am in heaven because the table is white. There seems to be room for a small
apartment in my thoughts, but no apartment. Come
in come in, says the shot-gunned door. Something unnatural seems to be
rising with the dawn, trending into coffee and a bagel and a gently tortured
conversation about mutation, but without words, the way a silence can be
focused, an ache you think sleeping awakens.

If I can’t
remember what I’ve said to cause you to feel this way, that may be because it’s
only a toy, but you can fix it, make it do something unimportant and wonderful.
It’s the kind of sincere carelessness demonstrated by diligent blind
consortiums of inspectors of questionable intentions, who might just be a
little too curious about the condition of our understanding. I told them I was
empty. If I had had any less, I would have eaten my words or saved them for
later in a small bag of fragrant apple stems. I can remember how cute the words
were. They were right next to the carefully lined bag of equally fragrant
pudding stems. They stirred as frequently as wind chimes.

I was trying
to eat something that didn’t require teeth, but I had teeth. A bag of preserved
fruits seemed to be squatting in a generous glove box. One of my thoughts had
been wounded and was licking itself. For a while I did some things people
thought I should remember. Then I didn’t do them anymore. Then I thought about
doing them again.

This might be
a sad story because nothing really works out. You could take it away like bad
food, the kind of food that gets you in trouble when you’re hungry. You could avoid
ingesting its temporary privileges. Life says start and you start, badly
perhaps, and life says stop, and you do not, though all who know you may remind
themselves with it that you are no longer merely you.